Yesterday evening, over dinner, my friend and I couldn’t help but overhear a man on another table espousing the benefits of cannabis. Over a tiramisu, he stressed how cannabis can cure all ills including cancer and Alzheimer’s (There is some pre-clinical evidence,for these claims, but not all of the literature agrees). What our pro-cannabis lobbyist failed to mention, however, is that the modern cannabis is increasingly ditching the health giving cannabinoids in favour of more and more of the psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

A new study from Australia has now backed up these results. Wendy Swift of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, and colleagues, used high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to analyse the cannabinoid profile of cannabis confiscated from users by the police. They found that the seized weed showed high levels of THC (at least 15% in about half of the samples) but negligible amounts of any of the therapeutically useful cannabinoids. Good for getting wasted perhaps but not for the benefits I heard promoted last night.

Digging down in the paper though, it seems there is a wide degree of variability in what is, it has to be admitted, quite a small sample (n = 206). The team say there was no difference between the profiles of outdoor and indoor grown weed overall but one of the samples contained a much higher proportion of cannabidiol (CBD) than all the others (6.5% when the mean was 0.14%). CBD has got a lot of attention for its anti-emetic and anticancer properties and I can’t help but wonder if somewhere in New South Wales there’s a supplier breeding high CBD weed for medicinal use. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

What we can say for now is that this study shows that cannabis is getting stronger and stronger. I wonder if that might change as more people, like my ‘friend’ from last night, become aware of the benefits of the other cannabinoids in cannabis, and the benefits beyond getting stoned.

Analysis made of the public speeches given by police officers over the past 50 years have concluded that the THC content of cannabis is now close to six billion times higher than it was in 1963.

The study, led by University of Canterbury psycholinguist Dr. Viktor Nilsson, searched over 20,000 police statements and documents for hard data about how much stronger cannabis was at time of writing when compared to a short number of years ago.

“Cannabis growers, being filthy, lying, cheating, murderous enemies of humanity, do not keep accurate year-on-year records of chemical analyses of their product, so we need to use other methods to estimate the current strength of cannabis,” Dr. Nilsson explains.

“One of our team noticed that the police often point out how much stronger cannabis is now than it used to be. We figured that since the Police would probably have access to a greater variety of cannabis strains than anyone else in the country as well as the chemistry labs in which to perform accurate testing, they would be the ones to trust.

“So we looked at statements made by police officers in which they mention how much stronger cannabis is now than it was a given number of years ago.

“For example, a police sergeant in 1972 said that cannabis was now ten times stronger than it was in 1967 – that is, five years previously – because of new strains coming in from Asia. In 1978 a detective said that selective breeding techniques had made cannabis eight times stronger than it was five years ago. So that’s eighty times stronger than it was in 1967.

“The next decade saw a similar increase and if you add them all up it means modern cannabis is around six billion times stronger than what we had in the early sixties. In fact, it seems that, on average, the strength of cannabis increases by around fifty percent every year.”

The findings were so surprising that Dr. Nilsson had to enlist the help of a theoretical physicist, Professor John Hardie, to interpret them.

“There is now so much THC in the average strain of the cannabis sativa plant that only a tenth of one percent of it is even visible in the physical dimension. This plant is a thousand times bigger, a thousand times more massive, than it appears.”

Hardie concedes that some of his fellows have expressed some cynicism about his theory: “Which rather implies that the police might have got their figures wrong, or exaggerated them for some reason.”

Hardie points out that the theory that the cannabis plant is replicating itself into hundreds of metaphysical dimensions opens up new avenues for research. “At the current rate of THC increase, we can confidently predict that by the year 2100, simply lighting a joint anywhere on the Earth’s surface will release so much THC that the entire world will be stoned for a week. Even if they don’t inhale.

“Already by next decade it should be at the point where your getting stoned also makes a hundred thousand versions of you in parallel universes stoned. So perhaps anyone smoking a joint should not only be at risk for cannabis possession, but also supply, kidnapping, criminal mass stupefaction and a host of other offences.”

Dr. Nilsson said that the findings demanded a certain level of caution around future approaches to cannabis policy.

“We know that the Police estimate that every kilogram of cannabis does $10,000 worth of social harm to New Zealand. Well, if this modern superskunk is a billion times stronger than even pure THC, a few kilograms of it could cause New Zealand itself to sink into the sea.”

When asked what he thought of the research, local Senior Sergeant Greg Smithers said that anyone doubting the veracity of the Police’s figures “ought to think of the children,” and not ask questions that might undermine the morale of drug squad officers.
- See more at: http://www.alcp.org.nz/vote2014/node/262#sthash.zeOlv8LA.dpuf